


burn out forever or light up a spark

by astrolesbian



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Gen, Minor Character Death, Past Idealist Grantaire, Rallies Gone Wrong, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-21
Updated: 2015-09-21
Packaged: 2018-04-22 19:29:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,825
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4847525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/astrolesbian/pseuds/astrolesbian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Éponine sits bolt upright, sudden and sharp, her eyes wild. </p><p>“R isn’t here,” she says, and Feuilly, standing by the door, stumbles backwards into a chair.</p><p>-</p><p>After a rally that turns into a riot, Grantaire finds himself in a jail cell.</p>
            </blockquote>





	burn out forever or light up a spark

**Author's Note:**

> this one-shot is based off an ongoing au i'm currently writing. in it, grantaire was raised by his grandmother until he was about eight or nine, and then she died and he was sent to foster care. he met feuilly in a foster home when he was fourteen, and feuilly promised that when he turned eighteen, he'd adopt grantaire and they could live together and be family. but when feuilly turned eighteen and moved out, grantaire was sent to another home, and they didn't meet again until grantaire's first amis meeting, something like ten years later.
> 
> thank you to **knightinbrightfeathers** to pointing out that grantaire wouldn't use 'bubbe' to refer to his grandmother, since he is brown and would be a sephardic jewish person rather than a (usually white) ashkenazi jewish person, and sephardic jews use a dialect called 'ladino' rather than the more widely known ashkenazi dialect of yiddish. i've replaced it with 'nonna', the ladino equivalent of 'bubbe'. :)
> 
> it's also based off of two posts on tumblr, one about past-idealist!grantaire and one about how no one ever really writes about the amis protesting in a way that reflects real life -- protests are not always peaceful and they definitely never go the way you plan.

He can’t stop shivering, and he suspects that it’s more to do with fear than with cold. The cell is dark, with only a single hanging light bulb that flickers occasionally. Grantaire has given up trying not to look at his bloody knuckles. He hasn’t given up not splitting them open again, though. They’ll already be pissed he got arrested—he should know better, but that cop had been coming for fucking _Gavroche_ —

He closes his eyes. He wishes he had his phone. Or a watch.

“D’you mind giving me the time?” he asks the cop outside his door. 

“Three twenty six,” the cop says automatically, then looks pissed at herself for saying it.

“Thank you,” Grantaire says. She doesn’t answer this time. She’s learned her lesson.

Three thirty in the morning, no call, and no one’s come for him. He hadn’t thought they would, but—

His stomach hurts, and it’s like he’s being shown a barrage of images, all at once. Feuilly in bed this morning, snoring away; Grantaire making coffee and hoping so much it hurt. Enjolras in the aftermath of the rally, screaming for Combeferre, turning his head this way and that, and Grantaire trying to fight his way over to him, and then—Gavroche running, Eponine grabbing hold of Cosette—the cop standing over him, pushing him into the ground; _I got one I got one Igotone_ , like it was a sport or a game or something other than a fucking _massacre_ —

Sasha’s eyes, dead and wide, three years ago and counting. God, he hopes he won’t see dead eyes when he gets out of here.

_If_ he gets out of here.

He shudders again, still not from cold. Sasha’s face swims at the edge of his vision, and he feels blurred, the way he feels when he’s drunk. God, he wishes he was fucking drunk right now. Fucking Sasha. Fucking Gavroche. Fucking kids all twisted up in this hopeless mess—

He wants to puke. He can still smell the rusty blood on his knuckles, and it’s making his stomach stage its own revolution. 

He doesn’t dare ask for the time again, but—

Nearly four, and no one’s come. No one’s given him a phone call.

He hunches down onto the bench and gives into the urge to pick at the scabs on his hands.

 

Éponine sits bolt upright, sudden and sharp, her eyes wild. Gavroche is still gathered tight into her arms, his eyes sleepy and a little shell-shocked. Jehan opens their mouth to ask what’s wrong, but trails off at the look in her eyes.

“R isn’t here,” she says, and Feuilly, standing by the door, stumbles backwards into a chair.

“I thought he—” Jehan says, and their throat tastes of sandpaper and desperation and blood. “He always texts you. Ponine. He _always_ —he goes off and gets smashed and he texts you.”

“He didn’t,” Éponine says, and there are tears in her eyes, sudden, sharp tears. Sudden and sharp, so very, very Éponine. “He didn’t—I only just realized, I don’t know where he _is_ —”

Feuilly looks shattered, and then, very visibly, like he’s pulling himself back together. Jehan crosses the room to sit next to him, and takes his hand. “R will be okay,” they say, and can’t seem to sound like they believe it. They try again, but it still comes out terrified. “He’ll be _fine_.”

And on a normal day he would be, Jehan thinks, but today—today police have gone after all of them, today Enjolras’s head was matted with blood, brown skin with red flecking it like terrible versions of his freckles; today, R is missing, and he hasn’t texted Éponine, and on a normal day it would just mean he forgot, but today it would mean —

Feuilly is sporting a black-blue-green eye, the flesh swelled and dangerous looking. It is usually the white of his teeth that stands against his skin; Feuilly is jolly, warm, smiling. Today his eyes stand out, skin swelled and blue and purple, white against dark, his mouth a line, his head buzzed. He looks sharp, like Éponine. Jehan squeezes his hand, and even that feels sharp; with his brother missing, Feuilly is a live wire.

“We have to find him,” Éponine says, panic and sharpness and worry blurring, her voice turning into a fragile thing none of them recognize. Gavroche looks at her, and for the first time all night he seems worried. (Chased by a cop, and only _now_ is he worried—)

“I saw him,” he says. 

Feuilly stands, a quick jerky movement, and that is not like him either—Feuilly is measured, Feuilly is the calm before the storm—

“Where?” Jehan asks. Their hands are trembling, one still wrapped around Feuilly’s. 

“He—the cop was coming after me,” Gavroche says. “Then R said something and the cop—got him. Instead.”

Feuilly makes a noise of desperation. “So he’s in the hands of a cop. A fucking brown Jewish _orphan_ in the hands of a _cop_ , that’s fucking reassuring—”

Feuilly cuts off, takes a breath. Sharp again, in and out. Jehan presses their fingernails into their palms, and that’s sharp too; sharp blood and sharp noses to follow it, like hounds, like police; following the scent of Grantaire’s bruised knuckles. Gavroche looks scared, and small suddenly; he hasn’t looked this much like a child in a long time, longer than Jehan has known him.

“He gets a call,” Jehan tries, and their voice is small. “Right?”

“Who gets a call?” Joly asks, and half-walks/half-leaps into the room, his cane clicking sharp against the wood floors. Everything is sharp, fucking _everything_ is sharp, the air is sharp in Jehan’s lungs and they’re closing up, and the lack of air will be sharp too Jehan thinks hopes fears—

“Grantaire,” Éponine says, and Joly’s cane clatters, slipping on the hardwood, and Bossuet catches him before he can fall but now they’re yelling, and it’s so loud, ringing sharp sharp sharp on Jehan’s ears, against their body; and Grantaire is in the hands of a cop and the world is very, very cold, receding to a small point in the distance where they were happy in somewhere like yesterday, but that was yesterday; now everything is sharp sharp sharp and Jehan _wishes_ it wasn’t Grantaire, anyone but Grantaire, anyone but Grantaire who had to see a cop come after Gavroche, not after what happened before, with Sasha—

Enjolras’s voice is reedy, thin, far away. Not sharp, and Jehan tries to listen.

“We have to get him out, we can’t leave him in there—”

“We don’t even know where he _is_ ,” Bahorel, defeated. Feuilly’s answer is too sharp for Jehan’s ears to decipher, but it’s loud, bitter, wild. _My brother_ he says. _Not giving up_ he says. 

A small hand slips into Jehan’s, and then Cosette is smiling, sweet as sugar, not sharp at all. 

“We’ll find him,” she says, and they try to say _okay_.

 

“Do I get my phone call?” he asks, pulling up the courage at five, when the sun is starting to glow in the distance, when he thinks they all must be as tired as he is, more willing to say _yes_ instead of _no_. The woman outside his cell glances at him, and then looks away again. Her eyes are tired, tired, tired. She has seen this all before, he thinks, some other half-drunk asshole yelling at a cop in the dead of night, tattoos up his arms, brown and alone and worth nothing. A menace to society, they’d say, if he died. Probably stole something, looked unshaven, looked drunk. _Whatever lets them sleep_ , he thinks. 

He tries again. “Do I get it? I need to tell—my brother, I need to call my brother.” His throat is raw, dry. He tries to swallow. He tries to breathe even, to not panic, to not breathe in the smell of blood coming from his knuckles. 

“You don’t have a brother on record,” she says; of this she is sure. They have prepared her for his possible lies. 

“He’s my foster brother,” he says, and the worst part is it’s the truth, and she still doesn’t believe him. His stomach hurts, and it smells like blood, and Sasha’s eyes are blurring with Gavroche’s eyes, and it all whirls together until he wants to puke. 

“Please,” he says, then nothing else. The sun rises, ever slower, above the horizon.

Eventually, she leaves, and another cop takes her place. Her shift is over. He is a memory, now.

He asks again for a phone call, and the answer is no.

He can feel bruises blooming under his shirt from where the cop pressed knees into his back yesterday, during the arrest.

He asks for the time, and this, at least, he is given. Six seventeen.

It is early and late all at once, and it smells like blood, and all he can think of is Sasha.

 

Before he was this mess of a person he was Nonna’s grandkid, and then he was Feuilly’s brother, and growing up knowing people like that made you want to fight, even if they left you. (Even if everyone did.) Everyone thinks he doesn’t believe because he doesn’t care, but the truth is worse—he doesn’t believe because he can’t fucking bring himself to, not anymore, not after Sasha.

Sasha is what fucking destroyed him, in the end.

He knew her from foster care, and that was what they’d protested; the system and kids getting into it when there were families willing to adopt, when there were kids willing to be adopted. It was a group not unlike the Amis, just a bunch of crazy kids meeting on weekends and wanting to make a difference. Enjolras would have loved it. 

It was all foster kids or former foster kids, complaining and dreaming and crafting something better, and Sasha was right in the middle of it, all smiles and brass knuckles tucked into her pocket where you couldn’t see them, but so much hope about everything. She talked about finding her family like she was still seven and believed she had one. His first time meeting her has faded from his memory, all he remembers now is this: promising her he’d find a way she could get a family, and her grinning at him, eyes glowing.

She was fifteen and he was nineteen, and she snuck out of her home to march with them in the night, candles glowing in their faces and signs in their hands, marching and chanting loud. Convinced they’d make a difference. She smelled like cinnamon before, sharp in your nose; she made him sneeze and it made her laugh and he’d laugh too and sneeze again. After, she didn’t smell like anything. And he could never conjure up the smell of cinnamon. It was always just her face, brown and drenched in blood. The smell of it in the air. The cops, everywhere.

He knelt down next to her and cradled her body, and all those kids were dead. And she was fifteen, and he’d been hoping to find some way to get her out of her house, away from the foster parents that only did it for the check, into his apartment. She’d be his sister, he told her, like Feuilly had told him, when Feuilly was seventeen and he was fourteen and Feuilly glowed like he was made of the world— _we’ll be family._  

She had eyes like Feuilly, eyes made of the world. 

They were so empty, after the cop pulled his gun on her.

Empty.

And she was fifteen.

And he was nineteen, and the cops had to drag him screaming away from her body and into the car, and they didn’t give him a phone call then, either.

There was no one to pay bail, but the photo of him cradling her circulated the papers. The cops had no evidence he was even at the protest to do anything besides find Sasha and get her home. And in the end, it wasn’t even worth it to have a trial: they just let him go, back onto the street with no home and no job, with Sasha trailing after him like a misguided ghost, until he drank her away.

 

Joly has been talking, and pacing, and talking, and pacing, and the _clack_ of his cane on the ground makes none of them want to listen. They’ve known each other long enough to recognize signs of panic in each other’s bodies, and everyone keeps looking at their phones. They’ve all called him half a dozen times. He hasn’t picked up. 

“He _always_ picks up,” Feuilly says, and it feels uncomfortably, terribly like years ago, when he was eighteen, trying to get a call through to foster care, trying to take his brother home.

They took him away, and Feuilly couldn’t get him back; it was only chance that they met again, at an Amis meeting, Grantaire older and darker around the eyes, but his hair was the same, messy curls that stood up an inch off his head. 

Only luck. Only chance. 

Feuilly isn’t going to leave it up to that again.

“I can’t do this again,” he says, and it rings out awkwardly in the room. Bahorel puts an arm around him,and he shrugs it off. “I can’t. I lost him once, and it was the worst thing —”

He puts his head in his hands. The rest of the Amis look half scared and half worried, the same as before.

“We won’t let it get to that,” Enjolras says, determined. “We can call the police station, ask if they have someone in custody—”

“And if they don’t?” Feuilly says, and he’s on his feet. “If they don’t have him in custody? They could have _killed_ him—”

Enjolras is pale, his freckles standing out sharply. His head is shaved and bandaged, probably by Joly or Combeferre, and he looks just as lost as the rest of them do, and Feuilly takes a deep breath and then lets it go. He hates fighting with Enjolras, especially when it’s like this, and Enjolras can’t find the words to fight back. 

“I’m going to go to the station,” he says, “they probably don’t know my face—”

“We can’t risk you too,” Courfeyrac says, uncharacteristically serious, and Feuilly wants to say _don’t you dare, he’s worth it, I need to find him_ —

The phone in his pocket rings.

He has it out within a second.

“Grantaire?”

“Hey,” Grantaire says, and he sounds exhausted, beaten down and tired. “I can’t—I need bail, I just—”

He trails off. 

“We’ll come to get you,” Feuilly says. “How much is bail?”

“He fucking—he looked so much like Sasha,” Grantaire says. “Those big fucking eyes—and the cop was coming, I didn’t know what to do—I just —”

“I’m coming,” Feuilly promised. “I promise I’m coming.”

“Tell Gav it’s not his fault,” Grantaire says. “He just fucking—and Sasha—and the fucking smell, all blood and cinnamon—I want to go home.”

He sounds tired. Just so fucking tired. Like he sounded when he walked into the Amis meeting and saw Feuilly. Just like he sounded when he sighed and shook his head and said _you never came back for me._

“R,” Feuilly says, tries to turn his voice soft and not frantic. “Did they hurt you?”

There’s a pause.

“Just come,” Grantaire says. “Please.”

Feuilly holds the phone to his ear and listens to his brother breathe, until he’s met with the dial tone.

“Is he okay?” someone asks, he doesn’t know who it is. His ears are ringing.

 

Grantaire stumbles out of the cell and into Feuilly’s arms, and he doesn’t say a word all the way home. Sasha stumbles through his mind in a haze of smoke, followed by Gavroche, and he sleeps on Feuilly’s shoulder and his back _aches_ —

“Jesus, R,” Feuilly says, peeling off his shirt. “What did they do to you?”

“Kneeled on me,” he mumbles. “God, Feuilly, it was just like Sasha—”

“I know,” Feuilly says, helps him up. Jehan and Éponine are hovering in the doorway. _Who’s Sasha_ someone whispers, and it blows away. He stumbles, tired, sore, empty. 

“Come here,” Jehan says, and their arms are around him. “It’s okay.”

It’s a lie, it shakes through him. Sasha’s gone. She’s always been gone. Everyone is, and it’s all back now, hovering close to the surface from where he’d pushed it, from where he hasn’t let himself think about it—

“Or,” Jehan amends, “it will be.”

Grantaire wraps his arms around them, trying to hold still.

“We’re all alive,” Jehan says, and their voice is soothing. He feels balanced on the edge of panic and apathy, but their voice is cutting through. 

And Grantaire thinks of Feuilly, not Sasha; his new friends, not his old ones. He breathes, in and out.

He holds on.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> please leave a comment if you read, esp. with critique -- i really appreciate it!


End file.
